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Categories: A New Way of Looking at Instructables Answered

We sent out this announcement to showcase the new Categories available on Instructables. Tim O'Reilly wrote about why he likes them, which made us pretty happy. Are you finding them useful and intuitive?--Christy

April 4, 2007Alameda, CA -- Instructables has just released Categories, a new feature that will enable users to better browse, sort, and share knowledge online.

Instructables.com is a free site that founder and CEO Eric Wilhelm describes as "a place where passionate people share the things they do and how they do them. It's an on-line DIY magazine, written by the people who read it."

Current Instructables range from recipes and home repair tips to art, science, and LED projects. "The categories emerged organically as the site has grown," Wilhelm explains. "It was time to apply a taxonomy."

Users may now tag their Instructable with two of eight categories: Art, Craft, Food, Home, Life, Not Liable, Ride, and Tech. Food, Art, and Tech categories are basically self-explanatory. Craft includes sewing and knitting as well as welding and woodworking; Home is for useful domestic organization and infrastructure; Ride includes cars, bikes, boats, planes, and other "things that go". Life skills can be found in Life, while Not Liable is for anything that should come with a warning label- things of interest to 14-year-old boys of all ages and genders.

Instructables began as a way for the founders to document their own personal projects, and soon grew into a separate company. Since then Instructables has exploded in popularity. Instructables won the 2006 Wired Rave Award for Industrial Design, was showcased at the Web 2.0 Launchpad, and is listed by Technorati as one of the top 100 blogs. It currently has over 3,600 projects and 60,000 registered users.